Modernism and the Size of Russia

[ulvesang.livejournal.com]

Time for an off-the-wall question from such an off-the-wall person!

What is life like in rural Russia these days?-- I've heard that one can still travel back in time a hundred years to find little villages away from anything-- like the kind of village that conjures images of stave churches and horse-drawn sleighs-- where people have never even seen a computer. A tutor at uni who's from Siberia (for whom moving to some place like Tomsk was running away to the "big city") says that the only place youˈll ever go in Russia where not a single soul will know a word of English and maybe not even know where America is would probably be in deep Siberia. Now, some places in America still think that the world is flat, but you can find that even in the cities. ;)

So anyway, just how far "away" is rural Russia? Can I truly find my dreamland of a pre-industrial communal paradise? ;)

/end rambling